Examining Welfare Reform and Families

By Leslie RiceHomewood

How will the far-reaching changes in the nation's welfare
laws affect children and
families in poor urban neighborhoods? When parents leave the
welfare rolls, will they find
steady work? Will their families face increased hardship? Will
their children benefit or
suffer?

These are the questions to be addressed in a four-year, $19
million study of
3,000 families in Boston, Chicago and San Antonio by re-searchers
at Johns Hopkins and
several other universities. The study, which was officially
announced Dec. 15, begins just
as many states will be removing families from the welfare rolls
when their two-year time
limits expire in January 1999. (The study's website is located
here:
www.jhu.edu/~welfare/.)

"To many people, the welfare story ends when families go off
the rolls," Cherlin
said. "We want to document what happens to parents and children
in the months and
years afterward.

"Supporters of the new laws think that children will benefit
because their mothers
will find jobs, feel better about themselves and be better
parents and role models.
Critics think that many children will suffer because their
mothers will be unable to make
the transition to the work force and will face greater distress,"
he said. "In truth, no one
knows for sure what will happen. This is the greatest social
experiment with the lives of
poor children since the welfare program was created during the
Great Depression."

The study will identify 2,800 low-income families, half of
them receiving welfare,
and then interview them three times over a four-year period
beginning in March 1999.
Researchers will collect much more detailed information about
children's social and
cognitive development than most household surveys including, for
800 families with at
least one child between the ages of 2 and 4, visits to daycare
settings, where they will
rate the quality of the care given; interviews with fathers; and
videotaping of mothers
and children doing activities together.

"An additional 200 families will be observed closely by
field workers, who will go to
job interviews with them, accompany them to the welfare office
and get to know the
rhythm of their daily lives.

"We hope to get a real sense of how the changes in these
laws affect parents
and children, but we also want to learn more about how poverty
affects children," said
Cherlin. "So, we'll be studying these families over time to see
how their lives change as
they move in and out of poverty. We don't think any one social
science method can
provide all the answers to these questions. That's why we'll be
using a combination of
surveys, detailed observations and anthropological field work."

Other project collaborators will include psychologist P.
Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, at
the University of Chicago; urban policy expert William Julius
Wilson, at Harvard University;
sociologist Linda Burton, at Pennsylvania State University; and
sociologist Ronald Angel,
of the University of Texas.

The study will be supported by grants to Hopkins of $12
million from the National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a unit of the
National Institutes of
Health; $1.2 million from the Office of the Assistant Secretary
for Planning and
Evaluation and the Administration for Developmental Disabilities
of the Department of
Health and Human Services; $1 million from the W. K. Kellogg
Foundation; and $500,000
from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. It will also be supported by
grants to other
universities from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the John D.
and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the Lloyd A. Fry
Foundation, the Woods
Fund of Chicago, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Hogg
Foundation. Grants
from the Boston Foundation to Harvard University and the Edna
McConnell Clark
Foundation to Johns Hopkins supported preliminary research.